Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  The playroom and spare room are both high-ceilinged, Victorian. When we first moved in they were cold and unwelcoming. But now a large log fireplace centres the playroom, a significant upgrade on the old electric bar heater that never worked properly. Like all the other rooms it has been incrementally improved over the last thirty years. A huge television screen is screwed to one wall. Not in the best possible taste perhaps, but it keeps Dad happy, in sofar as anything does. A plaque declares that on this spot in 1897, nothing happened. I had assumed my mother would object to it, but as he screwed it into the wall at some point in her final years she seemed to find it amusing. There are expensive sofas, and a rich green carpet that still feels new even though it isn’t, overhead cupboards, crammed with DVDs, video cassettes, Beatles records, old schoolbooks and reports, some theirs, some mine, some Matt’s, with their grades and verdicts that no longer seem to matter quite so much. Some of the newer Christmas decorations are stored here too.

  My father’s parents once inadvertently trapped a bird in the sash windows of the spare room above. We found it fanned out in a smear. As was our custom, the incident was never mentioned once the debris had been cleared. Mum’s red velvet wedding dress is folded away in one of the cupboards there. The rest of her clothes hang untouched in what was their bedroom.

  Bookcases dominate the hall. Built by Martin soon after we moved in, they run floor to ceiling. There are other smaller ones throughout the house. Two-thirds Mum’s – Shakespeare, Austin, Bronte, Hardy, A level study guides, a lot of poetry, more modern books that she used to teach her classes and like everything else of hers, Dad has not touched them in the years that have followed her death. Enduring Love, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, things like that. He is more an Agatha Christie man. Asimov, books about astronomy, mathematics and Egypt, that sort of thing. They both read the Christies for a time, but beyond Shakespeare their literary tastes did not overlap much. He went to Egypt after her death, years on from first reading about the place, but the trip was not a complete success. It had been an organised tour, mainly of women, who didn’t speak to the men much. But he saw the things he had wanted to see, and in the photographs he is smiling.

  The dining room, sitting room, utility and two of the bedrooms, mine and my parents’, were added in the 1970s. The kitchen looks out onto the Malvern Hills and there is a hatch between it and the sitting room that we used to climb through as children. My mother passed food and cups of tea through it with a relentless regularity that makes me feel guilty now. There are too many walls for modern living, though whether between sitting room and kitchen or kitchen and dining room, it’s hard to tell. In recent weeks my mind has turned to what new owners might do. I almost look at the place afresh as they might, which never ceases to make me feel guilty and, at another level that I don’t like very much, rigorously pragmatic.

  My mother would have had a central role in all of this if she was still here. This thing that went from nothing to a crisis in the time it took for his private test results to come through, as well as everything which has happened since, has only served to heighten the sense of impending disaster. I feel her absence, just as I see it in his face and feel it in the rooms of a house that still speaks of both of them, six years on.

  I have to do this for her as well as him, even if it is obvious to both of us that I am a poor substitute. I cannot cook, have a busy job an hour and a half away, a young family of my own. Yet these are all details. Really it is about reach. She understood him in a way that I do not. She could talk to him in a way that he and I cannot. Perhaps my pragmatism is really less about imagining new layouts for the downstairs and more about seeing all these limitations in both of us and pressing on anyway, on this drive to both the known and the unknown.

  Bosbury Church:

  Four

  Seasons

  Introduction to Four Seasons

  My mother was a creator too. I have a painting of a flower from her schooldays, which rests on our landing bookcase. The petals are perfectly formed, colours still clean and fresh after all these years, delicate and nuanced. The leg of the picture frame is broken and it is propped up a bit, but I do not want to attempt to fix it. Partly because of the risk of making things worse, but also out of a sense that this would disturb something, would be an intrusion. Mary Holmes is tidily written in one corner in blue ink. We all bustle past it day to day, but sometimes I stop to look or to point it out to the children yet again. They all nod politely and Maddie will talk about her grandmother’s sponge cakes.

  In some ways I am surprised that she did not write more and in other ways I am not. A handful of letters and poems (some of which were illustrated), a few fragments of diaries, some study notes. She was talented and capable but lacked confidence and energy. What energy she did have, she gave to everyone else. I sometimes think to how it might have been different. Whether she could have rested more and not tried to do so much, if we could have helped by asking for less. It is possible to imagine, I suppose. But whilst a much easier person than Dad was in a lot of ways, I don’t think she could have changed, or would have wanted to especially.

  At Bristol I had a professor who said she loved teaching but hated writing. A rare thing for such a person to confess to in today’s world of university league tables. I don’t think it would be right to say that Mum hated writing. Rather, much like my professor, her most natural environment was the classroom, rather than the written page. I had seen it for myself, when with her in the college, which I often was as I would walk there from my sixth form college for a lift home. She was completely at one with her students, both mentor and, friend and it was with them that her knowledge and feel for literature was at its most intimate. She was a sharer, not a hoarder.

  But there was a little writing too. I remember her writing the Four Seasons poems, and Travellers Joy which did not quite make the cut for her. Sitting at the dining room table with a rigour and seriousness of purpose, carefully thinking her way through the words she formed on the page. Channelling the history of the ageing village church, the enigma of the changing seasons, highlighting the ways in which people come to bear witness to this, if only for a time, much as she did. We are the live players on a stage that will outlast us. I cannot remember what the occasion was. A church festival or suggestion from the vicar, an idea of her own, I do not know. The poems were published in the local paper but I do not have the cutting. I think there is also a copy in the church archive.

  I did wonder whether the four seasons might have formed four groupings around which to structure this book, fusing everything that happened into the quadrants of the year. An artificial framework linked to her writing felt like quite a clever idea to me for a while. But it could not work like that. Too much of what I remember comes from summer and Christmas. Too many of the stories start in winter, whether literally or metaphorically. Every ending is also a beginning, and the stories and the sense of time do not work like that here, if they work at all.

  Hence, these poems do not appear as huge anchor weights, adding ballast to shaky metaphorical chapter structures. Rather, they feature within this story entirely as what they were. Staging points in Mary Graff’s mind, around the revolving year and the stone church that stood nearby unchanging throughout the seasons.

  Anna’s Letter –

  Yarmouth Car Ferry – 1975

  Below is a letter Anna wrote to my mother a few days after I was born. It had been a normal birth, then I went blue and spent a few days in an incubator, after which everything was fine. This is from my incubator period.

  Anna was highly maternal, which meant as we grew older that we sometimes found her fussy. She was the first of her generation of the family to die, in 1994, at a time when I was just bridging into adulthood. I was pre-occupied on the day of the funeral by a phone call I needed to make to somebody who was about to dump me. This was a time when not everybody had a mobile and neither I nor my soon to be ex did
. My thoughts were more on my life than on Anna’s that day. It was only looking back at this letter and some other cards from this time that I appreciated how much it meant to her to see her daughter’s children.

  I remember her being ill when we were quite young and being nursed at a convent where we visited her. It was not until years later that I learnt of her battle with depression and indeed anti-depressants. I never saw any sign of any of this, but my observation skills were not especially acute. I tended to look inwards rather than outwards, so am not really in a position to say. Despite her challenges she always seemed to manage to function. Life can be hard sometimes, but Anna found her way through it just the same.

  My dearest Mary,

  It was a joy to get Colin's phone call just as we arrived indoors last pm and to learn that everything was fine. I felt sure by the look of him that all was well. He arrived a fortnight early and you had a speeded-up delivery which no doubt was a little shock to him. However, a few days in the incubator will put that right.

  What you have to do is not worry about him. He is and will be 100%.

  As I said to you before, we are thrilled for you both. It is like this is happening to us.

  Another thing, rest on your bed in between his feeding etc. & sleep and read. It will help you to be more relaxed.

  We thought he was a lovely little chap & Colin is simply wonderful. He knows far more than I do about the whole business and I feel sure he was a tower of strength to you.

  Colin’s mother rang at 10pm and wanted to know all about you & the baby. I reassured her that all was well. Of course, they are very much looking forward to seeing you both & Benjamin, but will leave it to you to give the OK. Will be in touch with Colin on the phone tonight.

  Much love, sweetheart, and make the most of the rest. Put your legs up as much as possible and I hope the tights we found were OK.

  Hope Charmian1 will visit you again soon. She seems very nice. Please put your cards out and start to thoroughly enjoy yourself and your baby.

  Much love

  Mum xxx

  Moving In – 1983

  “I knew we would buy it straight away,” he once said. “Your mum took about half an hour of convincing.” I still remember that first afternoon, riding our bikes around the small orchard while Anna and Martin also looked on and my parents proudly surveyed the last house either of them would ever own. Anna and Martin’s mission to get me and Matthew from the Isle of Wight, where we had been staying with them for a few days while my parents sorted the move from Aldershot, had been successfully completed. We travelled with them on the old passenger ferry Brading and then onward by train to Bristol, and Dad was there to meet us all at Temple Meads for the final stage of the journey to Bosbury.

  “Is it this one? Is it this one?” we would ask as he increasingly seemed to be driving us into the middle of nowhere.

  “Are there any sweets?”

  “Can we stop in a minute? I need the toilet.”

  “Please don’t punch your brother.”

  I do not know if we irritated him during the journey, if the way in which Dad had imagined driving his children to the new house for the first time was different from the reality. Much as Arthur’s first meeting with Martin had also not quite gone to plan, was there a seed of frustration that was sown then that I never knew about?

  Eventually we arrived and ran straight out into the orchard where our bikes were waiting.

  “Watch out for nails,” Dad says; “don’t get a puncture,” as we meander through the longish grass this way and that, marking our territory, observing the sap that oozes from the split trunk of one of the apple trees. Three-quarters of an acre. Quite something compared to the tiny town garden we have left behind. We have arrived, even if there is the inevitable paradox of something being both home and utterly unfamiliar.

  That first night, listening to the quiet so removed from the continual hum of Aldershot traffic, it feels that we have come a long way, and not just in terms of miles. A new life ahead, things left behind, the occasional hoot from an owl breaking the peace. The night sky of the country is much darker than we are used to. We do not know that the rustling outside the window is the sound of bats, wings and that they have a nest inside the garage. There is a torch by my bed in case I need to go to the toilet in the night; the builders have already started fixing things, and finding my way around in the dark is not straightforward. There is little money left over and those floorboards on the landing that are rotten have been stripped out but not yet replaced. The possibility of injuring yourself if not careful is something we have been advised of a number of times. It adds to a sense of adventure and uncertainty.

  A new school ahead, at which I will show from my toy gold bullion truck a block of what I think is real gold, and another boy will bite it and declare that it isn’t, gobbing and spitting all over it. The same boy later proposes a few of us should run away to sea, where we will survive by drinking sea water. I express my doubts, but these are as nothing compared to my delight at being included in the plan, that inevitably does not come to anything. But that was all future then and is past now, along with my participation in cricket teams, carol singing, village fetes, Christmas plays and school hall fundraisers. You cannot move into a place like Bosbury and be anything other than an outsider really. Belonging is being able to trace your lineage to the Doomsday Book and if you can’t do that, then people will be aware of it, in a benign but still knowing sort of a way. I tell myself it is benign at any rate.

  A field with two duck ponds stands across the way from the house and in winter we would slide across them. They looked like large, fogged mirrors, a misty moon you could stare at and see very little reflected back. The snow would fall in fluffy white buds, always sticking, framing the landscape and accentuating the quietness. It did not take much, a couple of hours perhaps, for us to be snowed in. School closed; everything else was far away, strangely remote. We sometimes used the toboggan in the pond field, occasionally using the wooden sledge Martin had made for us, always remembering too late how heavy it was.

  It was colder in those days (it really was) and most years the water would be thick with ice. We would tentatively put a foot onto the surface and see if it creaked. Very occasionally it might. Rarer still but more than once, when we were out toward the middle, it offered a warning groan, but there was never an incident beyond the usual bumping and bruising that came from falling over. We liked the sense of danger and adventure, albeit I am surprised now that our parents were both so relaxed about the whole thing. We would eventually return home for hot Ribena and dry clothes.

  Living so far out brought a sense of remoteness that I spent years trying to escape from, until I realised that it was what centred me and increasingly called me back. Although if today I suggest to the children that we might move to the country, they will make clear that it is never going to happen.

  “We are all going to live in our Warwick house forever,” Gabriella will say.

  Oh, how I wish.

  When spring came Matt and I would hunt for tadpoles and caterpillars and sometimes snails to race. We would keep a variety of creatures in tins or jars or ice cream boxes in our bedrooms, though the snails would tend to wake up and escape, which could be awkward. With tadpoles it was always a question of timing in terms of when to put them back in the pond, which we sometimes got right and sometimes did not.

  One springtime we saw Caspar swim across the pond to catch and kill the baby ducklings. Grey and black striped, with amber eyes and a smudge of black on his nose; a ferocity and intensity far removed from the creature who curled up on my lap purring loudly through his dribble. We watched frozen from the bank as he ripped into tiny bundles of feathers, the hopeless shrieks of the ducklings’ parents making no difference in that season of renewal and new life that also spoke most to death.

  It was the same spring that going into the old
shed we discovered an orange tent on the concrete floor littered with bodies, all without their heads. Every sort of animal you would imagine a cat could catch, and some you would not. Mice, shrews, rats and garden birds for sure, but also moles, ferrets, weasels and a barn owl. Presumably he had found and transported the owl, rather than killed it himself. But who can tell? Perhaps it had been injured, or just especially unlucky. It might even be possible that Caspar had had nothing to do with the owl’s death, that the bird had wandered in looking for food. There were no witnesses. The owl was one of the fresher carcases, slowly rotting in the increasingly putrid air of the tin shed. Caspar lived to twenty-three, spanning my life as a child and the coming of my own children. He now rests under the bush next to the bird table.

  Our new home was a mile from the nearest village, in a hamlet of four houses, the middle of nowhere really. It was next to a thatched cottage that for most of our childhood was inhabited by a Mrs Sawmill, who loved her garden. She taught me that looking like a sweet old lady doesn’t make it so.

  “She was always unpleasant when she was younger, so what do you expect?” one of the villagers once said to my mother by way of consolation, who knew it but still let the old crone upset her.

  When a fire tore through her roof, many years previously, the people who had lived in our house at the time said that they worked through the night to minimise the damage. In the morning, she said to them, “You are never there for me when I need you, are you?”